The Next 5 Years of Web 2.0 Strategy

Although Web 3.0 is a hot topic, we shouldn’t forget that we are still enjoying a great deal of Web 2.0 technologies. Facebook, Google Docs and Dropbox are just a few of the great examples of how Web 2.0 is changing our lives. Yesterday I attended an inspiring departmental seminar with Professor Amy Shuen as the speaker. The title of the seminar is “The Next 5 Years of Web 2.0 Strategy: What's New in Healthcare 2.0, Gov 2.0 and Smart Planet”. As the name implies, the talk explores new areas at which Web 2.0 technologies can be applied. In this article, I will briefly describe what has been shared, along with some of my personal opinions.

Web 2.5 as a Smart Use of Web 2.0

Prof. Shuen mainly described three areas at which smart use of Web 2.0 can be implemented, namely, Health care, Government and Smart Planet. She actually refers to this smart use of Web 2.0 as Web 2.5 – an intelligent way to employ Web 2.0 technologies to improve our life.

Government 2.0

The featured system is called Streetline – a digital parking system for improving city operations. In a large city, drivers may find it difficult to find a parking space. They may have to spend additional time to locate a car park, which results in traffic congestion problems. Streetline provides drivers with real-time parking information such that drivers can locate a car park more easily. The system works by storing the availability information of car parks online, and then retrieves and updates them when necessary. As this reduces the time drivers need to find a car park, roads will be less congested and everyone’s time is saved.

In Hong Kong, parking space is not as scarce. But in busy areas such as Causeway Bay and Central, it may also be difficult to find an empty parking space. Thus, Streetline may help to reduce traffic congestion problems in these areas. Such system incurs costs, however. Therefore it requires more feasibility study and cost-benefit analysis to give a conclusion.

Smart Energy

Energy can be consumed in a smarter way with Web 2.0. In the talk, I heard about the smart grid project by Google and GE. With smart grid technologies, it computes electricity usage of a household. Google then makes this information online so that a user can access its electricity usage information via a browser, a mobile phone or anything that can connect to the Internet.

In the short term, people can learn about their usage and this helps to conserve energy. For example, if one finds that a considerable portion of his electricity bill goes to the computer usage, he can choose to switch off his computer when he does not need to use it (in fact, nowadays many people don’t turn off their computers even when they don’t use it).

In the long term, more can be achieved – if privacy is not an issue, we can make use of this usage information to analyze the consumption pattern of a customer (or an aggregate of customers). Companies can make use of this information to understand their clients more. Of course, to implement this we need the consent of the users to use their information.

Health 2.0

The featured system is called PatientsLikeMe. It is a social networking site for patients. In the site, patients share about their experience, treatment, symptoms, etc. It is believed that this information will be beneficial to those patients who suffer from similar diseases. For example, patients with similar diseases can infer from others’ experience on what to expect, what kind of treatment is good and what is not, what is the chances of recovery, etc. In addition, the information shared by patients may also contribute to advances in the medical industry.

Despite the benefits discussed, the use of the system is, in fact, quite controversial. Most concerns about privacy issues. However, Prof. Shuen points out that the collective value of this information cannot be underestimated. I occasionally take a look of the website and is surprised to see that there are already 70,000 members in the database, of which 10,000 is willing to make their profile public. In my opinion, as more and more people subscribe, less and less people care about privacy. In fact, one implication of Web 2.0 is that it is making people less cautious about privacy. Think about Facebook – ten years ago, would there be so many people willing to publish their real names online? And although recently there are many privacy concerns about Facebook, we never see its number of users drops. So, web technologies are in fact changing our values and attitudes towards privacy.

The Next Generation

In the Q&A session, Prof. Shuen was asked about her opinion on Web 3.0. Her view is that we should focus more on the application aspect. After all, it is always the application that rocks. She thinks that it may be the semantic web, or some other things that surprise us. What will it be? Let’s be creative!